Ellc looks at how a series of vocal workshops she co-facilitated at QUEERCIRCLE allowed queer folk to more fully embody their voices in creative ways.
Given widening health inequalities, the need for those of us in marginalised communities to find creative ways to reclaim, recentre and create healthier outcomes for ourselves is now an urgent necessity. With this in mind, can queer spaces in themselves be spaces of health creation? This article reflects on my experience of working with and participating in QUEERCIRCLE’s Queering the Voice workshop series, which I believe developed into a health creation space. I will present snippets of what was revealed during these workshops and consider what that says about how we can begin to unravel alienation.
Queering the Voice
The Queering the Voice course consisted of four in-person sessions over two months for professional and non-professional queer and trans voice-users. The sessions were led by queer vocal practitioners on a range of topics: decolonising the voice, the voice as a regulation tool, gender affirming speech techniques, and using improvisation to explore the voice outside of gendered expectations. There were 15 participants, 84 per cent of whom were Global Majority, 90 per cent neurodivergent and/or disabled, with ages ranging from 23-54 (the average age being 30).
Participants learned to be in communication with their voices and the narratives surrounding them – shaped by systemic oppression and gendered and racial hierarchies. These hierarchies, I argued in my thesis that I shared with the group, cause a fragmentation and alienation from oneself. I drew on the work of Sandra Lee Bartky (via Marx) who describes:
“a kind of inner impoverishment; parts of their being have fallen under the control of another. This fragmentation is the consequence of a form of social organization which has given to some persons the power to prohibit other persons from the full exercise of capacities the exercise of which is thought necessary to a fully human existence”
Bartky 1982, 129
The rigidity of gender binaries can create this inner impoverishment that affects queer folks’ ability to feel physically comfortable and confident in knowing their own voices – and following on from that, asserting and advocating for themselves through it. Participants on the course were given a range of resources and tools to begin making their way back to their voices and, by extension, back to themselves.
The experience deepened my resolve to continue to employ a systems thinking approach – “an enterprise aimed at seeing how things are connected to each other within some notion of a whole entity” (Peters 2014) as part of my personal research. Creative health solutions need to encompass an awareness of political and social histories that shape our understanding of ourselves, including our ‘voices’.
Sonic space
It is important to take note of not just what happened during the sessions but also the physical space these sessions took place in. Often queer spaces are ephemeral, ever-shifting locations sequestered to nightlife – hidden away and operating in shadows. QUEERCIRCLE is different: a stable location, a brick and mortar building. The mise en scène of QUEERCIRCLE frames the building as a co-creator of musical experimentation to facilitate personal and communal transformation.
Dhanveer Singh Brar’s ‘Teklife/Ghettoville/Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century’ dives deeply into the spatial dynamic of race-class. He describes how those three black music genres play off “the social – the sonic – the performative – the architectural & the pathological” (Brar 2021, 54).
To me, that reads as looking not just at the music produced, but the communities it emerges from, the physical spaces it inhabits, the headspace that is entered and the powerful, uncontrollable feelings that are produced by it, plus the way the artists’ performances disrupt the performativity of blackness. This feels especially poignant when I reflect upon this workshop series.
Brar also speaks on Nahum Chandler’s writing on ‘desedimentation’ as a function of black diasporic life that “places pressure on racial ontologies” (Brar 2021, 70). When I read this I thought of the ways QUEERCIRCLE, as a space, places pressure on sexual and gendered ontologies – disrupting and reorienting heteronormativity by placing queerness at the forefront.
Recalibration (not dissociation)
The course took place in a space that was not prescriptive – there was no rigidity in the organisation of the tables and chairs, the room always contained elements of softness and relaxation: the dimmed lights; the curtain separating the space from the entrance; sessions completely on the floor with participants sat on beanbags or mats that were spread around the room to allow for a constant physical flow of bodies.
The flexibility of the room and the explicitly reiterated statement that participants (many of whom were also neurodivergent or disabled as stated earlier) were free to move or recalibrate themselves within the space in accordance to their own needs – was a key component of ‘queering’ the space.
Recognising the need for there to be expressed permission to continuously attune to one’s body feels, in retrospect, like an obvious position to take but given how much autonomy is stripped away from queer, trans and gender non-conforming folk in day to day life, it shows the importance of epistemic justice when engaging in work like this.
Epistemic justice was at the core of this workshop series: it was explicitly stated that the practitioners were part of the co-creation of knowledge rather than hoarders/gatekeepers of it. Reiterating that participants know their bodies, and are allowed to exist within those bodies and call forth with their voices, however that sounds. This kind of permission-giving counters the systematic disembodiment bred by queer/transphobic stigma, shame, bullying, dangerous rhetoric and legislation. As social spaces both in real life and online become more hostile to queer, trans and gender nonconforming folk and NHS waitlists grow, community-based care in creative ways needs to exist and be accessible to counteract the spike in health issues that these social changes are creating. It is imperative that queer spaces like this exist and continue to engage with their service users in a way that is radically different from mainstream performance, rehearsal and learning spaces.
Participants had varied responses to different embodied vocal exercises, some feeling calmer and more relaxed after sessions, some having tingling sensations in their bodies that gave them energy / made them more present in their bodies. This shows that embodied vocalising can be a regulatory tool.
QUEERCIRCLE’s ‘Queering the Voice’ workshop series gave queer folk a place of acceptance to feel through their emotions / identities via their voices in a novel way. They reported that the course helped them access deep emotions in community with others that they weren’t able to normally feel. That it felt both healing to express themselves and hear the expressions of others. Communal embodied vocalising reminded participants of their place in the world, of being one that is part of a whole.
See the full QUEERCIRCLE takeover
About the author
ELLC (ell-cee) is a Nigerian-born, Northampton-raised and London-based vocalist, performer, writer and creative practitioner. Her writing across her various interests often centres black diaspora identities- drawing from feminist, marxist, queer and decolonial lenses. Her undergrad in English Literature and a MMus in Popular Vocal Performance has honed her keen interest in alternative ways of ‘knowing’, epistemic justice and the interconnectedness of art to sociopolitical movements. Her upcoming debut EP is a genre-blending exploration of self, societal responsibility and the erotic born from her Practice as Research (PaR) thesis.
References
Bartky, Sandra Lee. 1982. “Narcissism, Femininity and Alienation.” Social Theory and Practice 8 (2): 127–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23559009. Accessed August 5, 2025.
Brar, Dhanveer Singh. 2021. Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Peters, David H. 2014. “The Application of Systems Thinking in Health: Why Use Systems Thinking?” Health Research Policy and Systems, August 2014. https://health-policy-systems.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1478-4505-12-51. Accessed August 3, 2025.
